Microsoft SharePoint: How to Collaborate for Accelerated Growth

The most effective workplace in 2019 is a collaborative one. Businesses that work hard to remove department and process silos and open the airways to improved communication are businesses that will outperform their competitors and grow more capable of meeting the new demands of contemporary consumers. But for busy business leaders, encouraging collaboration can seem like a messy chore on a list weighed down by more pressing to-dos.

Underestimating the effects of improved collaboration is a mistake you don’t want to make in 2019, especially as convenient, full-featured apps and software offer an easy fix for disorganized or disconnected teams. Collaboration can improve productivity, raise revenue, and reduce the amount of time and money wasted throughout the year.

Built into Microsoft’s Office 365 plans is SharePoint, a resource you may already have at the ready to use in quickly boosting the success of your company. With document and content management, intelligent intranet, and structured and unstructured info all in one place, this tool is what today’s leaders are taking advantage of in order to better their business through technology-enabled teamwork.

SharePoint & Teams: How It All Works

Microsoft SharePoint is a mobile universal toolkit for teamwork that offers data management, content management, and intranet development and provides a suite of collaboration tools supplied by a single vendor. On any device, you can share files, projects, resources, applications, and more to collaborate effortlessly.

Why business owners are using SharePoint:

To save time, remove silos, get organized and boost productivity

To better scale the company along with growth

To maintain a secure, compliant method of content management and data sharing

To speed up internal projects, improve products, and brainstorm new ideas

To keep employees engaged and empowered and manage knowledge and information

Why You Should Jump on the Bandwagon

Sharing: Microsoft Office 365 is the best answer to today’s sharing struggles. It offers five key applications within its handy toolkit, among others, that directly benefit those looking to improve sharing within their organization:

Outlook

SharePoint

Yammer

Office apps

Teams

Bringing these tools together can better meet the needs of individual groups and activities and make tracking data and information sharing less complex. With a different tool to get the job done, you can empower your employees and make sharing experiences more beneficial for everyone, at all levels of the company. More well-equipped than other document sharing platforms, these tools bring organizations a security and compliance framework that’s much more manageable. Build and program business apps, integrate with other systems, and operate from a central hub for streamlined teamwork. Point systems can’t meet your needs in the same way that a united Microsoft platform can.

Communication and Collaboration: SharePoint makes it easy to deliver company news, discuss events, and share actionable content and knowledge that keeps your employees engaged. Microsoft’s intranet does all this and more through a custom interface that leaves room for personalization. AI, chatbots, and cognitive computing also widen the potential for Microsoft’s universal teamwork toolkit in the future.

Knowledge Management: SharePoint is the ultimate solution for harnessing collective knowledge, revealing new insights, and easily searching existing info and data to streamline processes and tasks. The platform has a powerful search function that reaches content within other systems and social networks for rich content management. Many organizations wrestle with finding info fast enough to leverage it and reuse it efficiently, but SharePoint lets everyone get and stay in the loop.

Transforming Business Processes: SharePoint can help teams execute and manage complex projects and workflows and support notifications, forms, approvals, custom applications, and automated tasks. Gather data and files, integrate different data sources, and build business apps that transform your business. Plus, the platform’s security means your team has the flexibility of collaborating inside and outside of the office across PCs, Macs, and mobile browsers—all perfect for the increasingly mobile workforce.

A Note on Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a like a more convenient Skype that blends well with Microsoft’s other products. Teams lets users interact during meetings, video calls, and chats without the separation from documents. Many companies are ditching Slack and GoToMeeting to tap into the integrated framework for third-party apps that Teams allows. Keep conversations tracked, managed, and secure while viewing files live as a group, recording meetings for those who missed out, reviewing business intelligence dashboards, and more.

A SharePoint Case Study

While SharePoint brings big benefits to large businesses, helping manage complex information systems and processes and easing the teamworking issues of big teams, it also brings the same level of benefits to smaller companies. You don’t need six figures to gain something from this platform—just a little time investment and a great partner to help you achieve your goals. See how this company used SharePoint to get their team back on track and make their employees happier and more productive.

The Challenge: An enterprise-sized media publishing company wanted to move to the Office 365 cloud and address recurring company-wide issues with information sharing and employee communications. They had too many documents and resources, which prevented the team from finding information quickly and maintaining a secure handle on paperwork. With multiple systems and jumbled communication, employee retention became a little unsteady and data breaches were a growing concern. The company needed to address system sprawl and find a way to maintain a competitive advantage through enhanced collaboration.

The Fix: The company turned to experienced partner Razor Technology to develop a user-friendly fix to their collaboration difficulties. Razor built an enterprise-wide divisional and departmental intranet to provide employees a secure spot for collaboration, communication, and finding information fast to make their jobs easier. The company needed to leverage both corporate and organizational knowledge to speed up daily tasks, and consolidating multiple servers into one place through SharePoint was the perfect solution.

The Result: The company gained a clean, easy-to-use site for managing client and partner projects and collaborating more effectively with their customers. With a secure intranet and extranet, they were able to maintain a portal for information sharing on a 24/7 self-service model that controlled the chaos. Access to info became transparent and SharePoint quickly became a central way to collaborate and update content, scale the business, and improve customer service. The fix also reduced the amount of time it took to locate resources and easily update and reuse frequently needed assets.

Learn More from Microsoft

You can also catch the Razor Technology team at the SharePoint Conferencein Las Vegas from May 21st through the 23rd. This conference will provide training, share new insights, and offer networking to successfully develop, deploy, govern, and get the most from SharePoint, OneDrive, Yammer, Microsoft Teams, Stream, and Office 365.

Get a Collaboration Fit Check

Interested in a SharePoint solution for your company?

Razor Technology offers a free Collaboration Fit Checkto analyze the current state of your business and provide you with recommendations on how to improve your teamwork efforts through solutions like Microsoft SharePoint and Teams. As a Microsoft Gold Partner and Certified SharePoint Partner for more than a decade, we can give you access to our full-service in-house SharePoint collaboration team to build, design, develop, and deliver your custom environment with a quick-start focus. In the Fit Check, we’ll review how you currently work with projects, customers, and products to show you how we build a matrix of people, processes, and technology to accelerate your company’s growth—complete with employee training to guarantee a smooth transition. Razor also boasts our own additional toolkit of third-party vendors and products that take SharePoint and Teams to the next level, offering industry-specific functional solutions.

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Jim Stillittano

Partner

In 2003, Jim Stillittano and George Sucher had a vision for Razor Technology that they sketched out on a napkin at a local restaurant in West Conshohocken, across the street from where the headquarters of Razor Technology would soon be established. Being seasoned industry professionals and having 360-degree experience working with Fortune 100 technology companies, it became apparent to both Jim and George that there was a void in the system integration space.

So the duo built a service technology platform that supports enterprise-grade infrastructure solutions by applying an unbiased technology approach, heterogeneous best-of-breed solutions and disruptive subject matter expertise to effectively help our customers manage their IT infrastructures while reducing cost. Moreover, they gathered a world-class team of expert technologists and built a company culture that cultivates innovation.

Today, Razor Technology continues to execute on the original vision and strategy that has since evolved into a full service, end-to-end, IT cloud infrastructure services company with best-in-class capabilities in the following areas: architecture, integration, deployment, and managed services. Most recently, Razor Technology’s consultative advisory organization has helped many enterprise customers transform their IT environments to harness optimal efficiency while integrating best practices and tribal knowledge. What started as an idea and a solution to fill a necessary void grew into a robust organization with offices in Philadelphia and New York, delivering value and full-service solutions.

Under the partnership of Jim Stillittano and George Sucher, Razor Technology has grown into a successful customer-focused company by stepping out of the service provider role and becoming a true partner to our customers.

George Sucher

Partner

In 2003, Jim Stillittano and George Sucher had a vision for Razor Technology that they sketched out on a napkin at a local restaurant in West Conshohocken, across the street from where the headquarters of Razor Technology would soon be established. Being seasoned industry professionals and having 360-degree experience working with Fortune 100 technology companies, it became apparent to both Jim and George that there was a void in the system integration space.

So the duo built a service technology platform that supports enterprise-grade infrastructure solutions by applying an unbiased technology approach, heterogeneous best-of-breed solutions and disruptive subject matter expertise to effectively help our customers manage their IT infrastructures while reducing cost. Moreover, they gathered a world-class team of expert technologists and built a company culture that cultivates innovation.

Today, Razor Technology continues to execute on the original vision and strategy that has since evolved into a full service, end-to-end, IT cloud infrastructure services company with best-in-class capabilities in the following areas: architecture, integration, deployment, and managed services. Most recently, Razor Technology’s consultative advisory organization has helped many enterprise customers transform their IT environments to harness optimal efficiency while integrating best practices and tribal knowledge. What started as an idea and a solution to fill a necessary void grew into a robust organization with offices in Philadelphia and New York, delivering value and full-service solutions.

Under the partnership of Jim Stillittano and George Sucher, Razor Technology has grown into a successful customer-focused company by stepping out of the service provider role and becoming a true partner to our customers.

Ryan Rosenkaimer

Director of Operations

As Director of Operations, Ryan oversees Razor’s managed services and cloud engineering, with a focus on driving positive customer support. Helping shape the overall direction of technology, infrastructure design and solutions for Razor Technology, Ryan applies his deep technical expertise to not only elevate the technical team but help Razor clients achieve value-driven results. Ryan dedicates himself to maintaining a broad and contemporary understanding of information technologies. This includes new technologies, trends, upcoming products and software and paying close attention to best practices as they develop constantly. Ryan has a knack for always staying ahead of the curve and making sure to pass on these ongoing changes in technology to Razor’s customers.

Ryan has over 17 years of experience developing operation teams and supporting the most advanced IT systems. He has extensive experience across Unix/Linux/Windows platforms, Network Security, Cloud Solutions, Virtualization and securing server environments. Prior to joining Razor, Ryan was the VP of Alura, a managed service provider, where he was responsible for developing the overall technology vision for the company and its customer’s. He also oversaw the daily operations of the business and the network operations support teams. He also was a winner of the Philadelphia Business Journal’s 2015 Top IT Professionals in recognition of his background in cloud security solutions.

Tom Reynolds

Director of Technology Solutions

As Director of Technology Solutions, Tom is responsible for ensuring that every Razor customer receives the best possible guidance when making technology decisions. Tom continuously assesses new technologies and monitors industry trends and best practices to ensure that any product or service offered by Razor is best in breed.

Prior to joining Razor, Tom spent over 20 years in technology management within the financial services industry. This allows Tom to bring a highly qualified viewpoint on infrastructure architecture, information security, and IT process to Razor’s customers. Since joining Razor in 2015, Tom has used this experience to improve and expand a key component of Razor’s services portfolio – The Razor FitCheck.

Tom holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from La Salle University, and has maintained a CISSP certification since 2005.

Christopher J. McGrath Sr.

CEO

After 20 years of technology and services company experience in various industries, Christopher joined Razor Technology in March 2013 as Director of Finance. Most recently, he was VP of Operations for Chadds Ford Auto Group. Christopher’s prior roles included Controller positions at both Insight Interactive and Unreal Marketing.

Christopher also served as Senior Accountant for Primavera Systems. In addition to Finance, he also manages facilities and operations for Razor. Christopher holds a BS in Accounting from Saint Joseph’s University and an MBA from Eastern University.

David Rosenthal

VP of Digital Business Technology Solutions

David J. Rosenthal is a passionate leader and expert at applying technology to solve business challenges. After a successful career in sales, IT, marketing, project and product management for firms such as Apple, AT&T / Ameritech, and CDI Corporation, David founded founded Atidan in 2005 to provide technology services and solutions to “Global 2000” clients. In late 2016, David sold Atidan to Razor Technology, a Philadelphia-based end-to-end technology solution provider.

After spending the first three years of Atidan broadly focused on Comcast Corporation, David has worked for global enterprises such as Interpublic Group, Viacom, NBC, Hearst, Time Warner, Reed Elsevier, The New York Times, WPP, Stryker, Gannett/USA Today, Havas, Kaiser Permanente and Microsoft.

David’s consultative, honest and advisory approach to the many small, medium and large customers has won him accolades from both clients and solution partners.

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